A memory comes back to her. A storm from six—or was it seven?—years ago that sent gale-force winds howling through Seattle. She’d laid in bed that night, unable to sleep, listening to the house stretch in places it hadn’t before, the wooden bones of it moaning and popping. She had never been an easy sleeper, and at the time, she couldn’t help but imagine every creak was the footstep of an intruder.

There was a part of her that had known no one would break in on a night like that, and there was another part of her—the middle-of-the-night, rotten-with-paranoia part of her—that thought a storm might be the perfect cover. She knew plenty of people who wanted her dead. Courtroom screamers. Mostly the fathers and uncles and brothers of those she had put away. Her car had been keyed more than once, her mailbox ripped off its pole. Anonymous e-mails filled up her in-box, calling her every racial and sexist slur, threatening to hurt her in every way imaginable. Once she came home to find a dead black cat nailed to her front door.

Her getting hurt didn’t scare her; Mia getting hurt did. That was the curious thing about having children. They soaked up all anxiety. Any way in which Nora might abuse or endanger herself—not getting enough sleep or eating crap food or dodging into traffic or knocking on strangers’ doors—became an obsessive point of concern for her daughter, as if all of Nora’s raw nerves and flammable emotions had been puttied together into a little creature. Nora had been accused of being cold, removed, empathy-proof. Fine, fair enough, whatever. But her feelings for her child were another matter. A child was the ultimate exposure, giving Nora a feeling in her mind like the tenderness of the skin beneath a bent-back toenail.

On that long-ago night, she’d heard a thump downstairs. And then a creak. Jack snored softly beside her. Waking him would only create more noise, so she slid open the drawer of her night table and reached inside and found the grip of her Ruger. She padded across the floor and paused at the doorway, listening between the big gusting breaths of wind and the peppering assault of rain.

She crept forward farther. From the landing she could see a light below, seeping out of the kitchen. She moved slowly down the stairs, her back to the wall, peering over the railing until she saw the tiny figure standing in front of the open fridge. “Mia!” she said and her daughter spun around. She wore her pajamas and her hair was smooshed on one side from her pillow. “What are you doing up?”

“I couldn’t sleep, just like you,” the girl said before returning her attention to the fridge and pulling down a bag of bread.